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Comment by kschua | Hacker News Reader

Peter Norton was my hero way back in the late 80's to early 90's.

I remember the first time I used Unerase to recover a deleted file and was fascinated by it. Then I discovered DiskEdit and began poking around in the FAT system and found out more about how DOS actually deletes a file. It actually marks the first character with a ?. Thus started my hacking days.

Then I used DiskEdit to bypass copy protection hacking the byte codes.

DiskEdit rescued me again when I switch to DR-DOS, set passwords on my files and forgot the passwords (fwiw, it was just setting the next dozen or so bytes after the file name in the FAT to zero)

Such memomories, DiskEdit and SideKick were my two must have utilities in the days of DOS

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I remember exploring COMMAND.COM with DiskEdit. In going through the compiled code I realized that the common DOS commands, (DEL, COPY, etc.) basically had a 3 byte string after them in COMMAND.COM that would cause the program to jump to some subroutine that executed the actual operations underlying the command. If you, say, copied the jump code for DEL and pasted that where the REN(ame) command was, and then installed that new COMMAND.COM on the PC's in the schools lab, it caused some very frantic reactions ;)

I remember downloading an early Linux kernel image (0.9?) at a whopping 9600pbs and, this seriously predating installers, using DiskEdit to install it on a spare partition, booting and being somewhat underwhelmed by an install which wasn't more than /bin/sh.

I try to remember this any time I'm tempted to gripe about modern Linux installs.

I learned x86 via his books, quite good reading, specially how to write a DiskEdit clone.

Guys, I hate to crash your heroes but it is John Socha [0] who you should really admire :)

He wrote Norton Commander and that Assembly book which was published under Norton's name.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Socha

Interesting. Thanks for pointing it out.

Hey! .... me too. I learnt a lot from his book -Inside the PC, which I think I bought by chance.

OT: I tried to get hold of a copy of Sidekick plus so I could play Vogon Poetry, but could not find this anywhere. So if anyone has a copy of Sidekick plus with Vogon Poetry....

and here I almost feel guilty for using DiskEdit to hack my game save files. Though I could sit and watch my disk defrag and would run maps just to see where everything was.

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